Delivering a project and presenting to a multi-level audience

Delivering a project you worked so hard on and presenting it, can be stressful, maybe even the most stressful phase in your project. However, it might not be the case, and it probably should not be. 

When you and  your team are done with a project, it is possible that your team do not deliver that project to a specific client. As a software engineer, you will have chances to present your idea or product to the users and customers. It is harder than delivering your product to a client because your client has at least some general knowledge about the product. Remember, not everyone are software engineers, some would say that software people are speaking in a different language than others. Stapa, Murad and Ahmad pointed out “engineers of the 21st century need to possess an adequate knowledge of effective communicative competence in ‘presentation skills’ and other ‘attributes’ required in technical oral presentation.” (2014, p.464)

There are few simple things you can do to make your presentation so interesting that people will actually talk about it after. It is called the Five W's (and one H), here are some tips from Nita K. Patel, from the Ohio State University:

Who? – Know Your Audience - Knowing whom you will address may be more important than knowing what you will present. It is imperative that your presentation be appropriate for your audience. You intuitively know that you would not present the same speech at your parents’ 50th anniversary celebration as you would at your friend’s bachelor party. So why would you present the same information at a management funding request and at a technical design review? Knowing your audience is critical to developing your speech, particularly with complex technical topics. You must frame your information in such a way that the audience will understand. Presentations are not for your (or your ego’s) benefit. Presentations are about the audience, their needs, perspectives and desires. As a result, you must understand your audience.

• When? – Know the Occasion - I dentifying when means defining the time, duration and occasion for the presentation. Time and duration will affect the length of your presentation and how many items you can cover during the presentation. The occasion will significantly affect how you structure your presentation. 

• Where? – Scout the Location - As a presenter, you must know where you are presenting and understand how the location will affect your delivery. Identify your audio/visual needs and ensure those needs are met.

• What? – Determine Your Focus (Content) - Understanding your audience, where you will present and the occasion completes only half the planning required. You must define what you want to say. It seems obvious that you should know the focus of your presentation. However, most speakers fail to define their core purpose in simple, concrete language before spending time writing the presentation.

• Why? – Identify the Importance (Message) - Why are you going to present? You might present to get the audience to volunteer their time, renew your grant or implement your process. Why describes the response that you want from your audience.

• How? Determine the Best Format - Once you know what you want the audience to do, you can focus on how you will present the information. Consider whether you will present the information in an informal chat, a seminar or a training workshop. Identify the presentation approach that will best convey your message. Consider whether you should be direct or beat around the bush.

Idrus, Salleh and Abdullah say in their article that “employers prefer to hire new graduates that not only possess technical competencies but also possess the non-technical skills required for project management. He lists interpersonal communication as one of the six most sought after skill-attributes by employers.” (2011, p.108). As you can see, communication skills are very important in life and at work.

References:

Idrus, Hairuzila, Rohani Salleh, and Muhammad Abdullah. "ORAL COMMUNICATION ABILITY IN ENGLISH: AN ESSENTIAL SKILL FOR ENGINEERING GRADUATES." ORAL COMMUNICATION ABILITY IN ENGLISH: AN ESSENTIAL SKILL FOR ENGINEERING GRADUATES26.1 (2011): 107-23. Asia Pacific Journal of Educators and Education. Web. 22 Nov. 2015.

Patel, Nita K. Technical Presentations: Book 1. Strategy - Preparation and Planning. N.p.: IEEE-USA, 2010. Ohio State University. Web. 22 Nov. 2010.

Stapa, M., Murad, N. A., & Ahmad, N. (2014). Engineering Technical Oral Presentation: Voices of the Stakeholder. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 118, 463-467. Retrieved 22 Nov, 2015.

What five technical skills are employers seeking? What five soft skills put you on top?

In today’s world, where everything is very competitive among people and companies, employers are looking for the best people for the job and people who are seeking work, are looking for the best job that pays the best. That what makes the industry very competitive. First of all, let’s define what soft and technical skills are. According to Cordero, Farris and DiTomaso, technical skills “involve knowledge of a discipline, and familiarity and competence in the use of the tools and techniques of the discipline.” (2004, p.20) In the term of a Software Developer, hard skills are the ability to write an application program using the programming languages such as Java, C, Python, etc., or the ability to analyze and troubleshoot the programming problems. According to Oxford dictionary, soft skill is “Personal attributes that enable someone to interact effectively and harmoniously with other people”. For example, it can be the ability to work in a team structure, or the ability to make decisions and solve problems.

Today, a lot of students are asking themselves, which technical skill I should know more than the other. Some student might say that Java is something that everyone should know, and another will say that everybody is using Python today. So which one is the one??? There is no certain answer that is true at all times. At this point, Java is one of the most popular programming languages in this industry because it can be run on multiple platforms. However, no one can guarantee that Java will still be the main languages in the next few years. In order to become a successful computer scientist, you should never stop learning and improving your technical skills because everyhing is changing so quickly in the field of computer science. Here are the top 5 programming languages in 2015:

Although it is true that technical skills will get you an interview, what will eventually will get you a job and promotions in work, will be the soft skills. Bakar and Ting claimed that “Soft skills have become increasingly important to employers because they do contribute to the success of a project and the organization. It is estimated that a project’s failure rate is between 40% and 70% and lack of soft skills as been identified as the main reason for such failure” (2011, p.82). According to Forbes.com, those are the top 10 soft skills that employers are seeking for:

1. Ability to work in a team structure

2. Ability to make decisions and solve problems (tie)

3. Ability to communicate verbally with people inside and outside an organization

4. Ability to plan, organize and prioritize work

5. Ability to obtain and process information

6. Ability to analyze quantitative data

7. Technical knowledge related to the job

8. Proficiency with computer software programs

9. Ability to create and/or edit written reports

10. Ability to sell and influence others

It is true that soft skills are really difficult the test during an interview and employers are doing their best to try and analyze you with different life experience scenarios. Eventually you might get the job without having soft skills, but it's very doubtful that you will last more than three months before they will fire you.

References

Adams, Susan. "The 10 Skills Employers Most Want In 2015 Graduates." Forbes. Forbes Magazine,              12 Nov. 2014. Web. 08 Nov. 2015.

Bakar, A., & Ting, C. (2011). Soft Skills Recommendation Systems for IT Jobs: A Bayesian Network           Approach. 2011 3rd Conference on Data Mining and Optimization (DMO), 82-87. Retrieved               November 14, 2014, from IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Cordero, R., Farris, G., & DiTomaso, N. (2004). Supervisors in R&D Laboratories: Using Technical,           People, and Administrative Skills Effectively. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING             MANAGEMENT, 51(1), 19-30. Retrieved November 9, 2014, from IEEE Xplore Digital                     Library.

Joseph, D., Ang, S., & Slaughter, S. (1999). Soft Skills and Creativity in IS                                                    Professionals.Proceedings of the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences –            1999, Track 7, 1-5. Retrieved November 9, 2014, from IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Keys for success when working in a team

               I think that when working with a team or within a team, it is really important, first of all is to respect each other. Mutual respect among the team member can solve and prevent a lot of issues even before they arise. In the Hands on Hearts team, we manage to accomplish this mutual respect from the first meeting we had, among us the developers and with Dana, out client.

               Regarding the red lines, in my experience in working with teams and within a team, the red line is usually related to the level of knowledge a person has and they are usually being pretty sensitive about somebody else’s criticizing them. For example, if my teammates are expert in C language, and I know Python and C also, but not very well, I would not go and start telling them that this approach was wrong or they should have used different style of code. Also, another red line that I think that should not be crossed is that every person idea is a good idea. It would be disrespectful if one team member will suggest an idea, and another team member will come up and say that this idea is no good, that can create a situation where people from the group will start to feel uncomfortable to suggest ideas, and maybe one of those ideas that they wanted to bring up but were too afraid to, will actually solve a major bug or a defect.

               The key to success of leading without being a leader is to just come up with original ideas and to know how to present them in a way the whole team will agree and understand. So far, in the Hands on Hearts team, I think that Frank has stepped up and in the last two sprints, he has been leading us with giving good ideas on how to proceed and a good interaction with Dana. It seems like she understands him and he understands exactly what she wants, which is really helpful, and also is helping us in the development process.

               One way to do the job done without one person doing the job for everyone is to create specific tasks that every member of the team agrees with. If the tasks will get distributed among the team members, but one member is not feeling comfortable with his task for any reason, he won’t do it, and he will create a situation where somebody else in the team will have to do this task. So the key here, is to make sure that every team member gets a task that he or she is the most comfortable with.

Client and team difficulties.

Actually our client is a programming savvy so I don't think that there is any situation where we don't understand her or she doesn't understand us. I think that the issue at the beginning was that our client thought that we have knowledge in creating high level mobile application. I think that our team's problem was with the technology, which is we don't have much experience in the outside world in creating functional programs that can be used in the industry. Expect from doing school assignments that are more useful in testing knowledge but not functionality. We did manage to come up with a different idea that our client agreed upon and thought that this will be a good start, and something that our client thinks that can be used as a good and functional substitution to the original idea. Agile was never a problem for us to understand and so is our client who actually showed a pretty knowledgeable details about agile and how a sprint is supposed to be handled, that for sure helped us a lot in managing our time and our stories. Also, I think that we are pretty much in the right truck regarding the team structure, each one of us knows his role and what he or she is supposed to do. Regarding the backlogs, I think that the problem here is that what we, as a team, came with the substitute idea for the original idea, we still not exactly sure what is the technology limits or our time limit. We are trying to avoid a situation where we will say that we will do some sort of a feature in the product but we would not be able to deliver that because our knowledge is limit or the time we have is limit; I’m pretty sure that our client is well aware of that issue and it looks like our client and we are managing to reach the middle ground. As I mention before, our client knows pretty much a lot when it comes to programming and to computer science, and she was using Agile back in the days, so I think that she knows all the policies, procedures, and the limits that the technology has, but not the limits that we, as students and programmers have.